Marguerite looked at her mother and said, “Have you nothing else to say to me about my marriage?”
“Can you hesitate, my child?” cried the dying woman in alarm.
“No,” the daughter answered; “I promise to obey you.”
“Poor girl! I did not sacrifice myself for you,” said the mother, shedding hot tears. “Yet I ask you to sacrifice yourself for all. Happiness makes us selfish. Be strong; preserve your own good sense to guard others who as yet have none. Act so that your brothers and your sister may not reproach my memory. Love your father, and do not oppose him—too much.”
She laid her head on her pillow and said no more; her strength was gone; the inward struggle between the Wife and the Mother had been too violent.
A few moments later the clergy came, preceded by the Abbe de Solis, and the parlor was filled by the children and the household. When the ceremony was about to begin, Madame Claes, awakened by her confessor, looked about her and not seeing Balthazar said quickly,—
“Where is my husband?”
Those words—summing up, as it were, her life and her death—were uttered in such lamentable tones that all present shuddered. Martha, in spite of her great age, darted out of the room, ran up the staircase and through the gallery, and knocked loudly on the door of the laboratory.
“Monsieur, madame is dying; they are waiting for you, to administer the last sacraments,” she cried with the violence of indignation.
“I am coming,” answered Balthazar.